Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

EVENTS

“I thought the internet was our future.”

Oh great. Another horrible movie I need to watch: Netforce. Not even Scott Bakula’s going to save this one.

“Somebody’s been hijacking the net bigtime.”
“I find VR so much more satisfying than the old emot-o-con. I mean with the new codec, and the megamodems, with compression…”
“Any kid that can hyperlink a gif is a webmaster nowadays.”

Welp. That last quote before the Everything is Terrible logo pretty much nailed the truth. And, I suppose, the one during that logo too.

Comments

I haven’t, but holy crap, no wonder NCIS never appealed to me. Two people on one keyboard? The mind boggles at what could be accomplished if we had one person on the keyboard for every letter! We’d be a Beowulf cluster of typists!

I have always been a sucker for horrible sci-fi movies, which I watch when I’m depressed for the lulz.

“8 Scenes that Prove that Hollywood Doesn’t Get Technology” was most gratifying, because even I, a non-gamer and non-computer geek, would have immediately noticed just how epically wrong these screenwriters were if I bothered to watch TV. Plus, whenever I don’t get something about my computer, I Google the term or my problem. No one ever had to tell me to do that. How hard is that?

My high-school calculus teacher– the one who insinuated I had no natural aptitude for science despite having rocked my honors science and math classes because I’d majored in English and was to be pitied and condescended to for switching careers– always bragged that Numbers appealed to her because she was a mathematician. (This was the same person who condescendingly assumed that I’d never be interested in viewing the Principia Mathematica at the Huntington Museum because I was an English major. She was fundamentally incapable of imagining the myriad motivations that people have for choosing majors in their teens.) Like some TV show with actors playing mathematicians and little math is some accurate measure of one’s love of math instead of doing math itself. I am so glad I ignored all of her insults and discouragement and broke off contact with her.

Junpier: I love you to bits, but why are people such goddamn dicks to you? Do they have like some kinda prior warning, or do you have a sign that says “stick the shiv in here”? :/

I remembered freaking out during one episode of… something… because they used Linux correctly. Nmap to port sniff, telnet to connect to it. I’m pretty sure Jodi thought I was about to rant but all I could say is “that’s awesome! Holy shit!”

It shouldn’t be like that. Fiction is better when it’s plausible. It doesn’t need that patina of dramatic effect, nor does it need to be written by someone who has no idea how physics works. And while I’m ranting, just once I’d like to see movie sound effects that don’t sound like they’re built out of dozens of sounds. Punches that sound like punches, and the like. Or space battles that don’t sound all “whoosh zoom pew pew pew kersplode”.

I heart Firefly. What’s not to love about it? Cowboys in space, realistic space sounds, projections of the future that include languages and cultures other than English and North American. It was sci-fi done extraordinarily well, and it explicitly flouted common sci-fi tropes.